Week 12 - Excellence and Creativity Flashcards
What is an expert?
How are experts created?
One view is that experts are
“born”
A second view is that experts are
“made”
Deliberate Practice View
The deliberate-practice view (Watson et
al., 1993) - becoming an expert is due to
accumulated amount of deliberate
practice.
◦ For example, spending a great deal of
time practicing a skill
This view comes from self-reports of
expert violinists –average of 10,000 hours
practicing.
Malcolm Gladwell termed this
“the 10,000 hour rule” – the idea
that you have to spend 10,000
hours on something to become
an expert.
In the scientific literature, this view has been
criticized:
By Gardner (1995) - the view requires a
“blindness . . . to decades of psychological
theorizing” (p. 802)
By Sternberg (1996) - “deliberate practice may
be correlated with success because it is a proxy
for ability: We stop doing what we do not do
well and feel unrewarded for” (p. 350).
By Anderson (2000) - “Ericsson and Krampe’s
research does not really establish the case that
a great deal of practice is sufficient for great
talent” (p. 324),
By Marcus (2012) - “it would be a logical error
to infer from the importance of practice that
talent is somehow irrelevant, as if the two were
in mutual opposition” (p. 94)
Macnamara and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis (a form of empirical review) of existing literature on the deliberate-practice view.
They examined the domains of music, games, sports, professions, and education.
Goals:
1) estimate correlation between amount of practice and performance
2) investigate factors which might moderate this relationship
88 studies met inclusion criteria
◦ Each study was coded for moderator
variables
The correlation between
accumulated amount of practice
and performance was used as the
effect size
Goals:
1) estimate correlation between amount of practice and performance
Figure 2 (p. 1613) shows that the correlations between practice and
performance were almost all positive.
The average correlation (r) of the 88 studies was .38.
The explained variance [r2 x 100] is 14%, meaning that deliberate practice only explains 14% of the variance in performance.
This means that 86% (!!!) of the variance in performance was due to something other than deliberate practice.
Results – Goal 2
2) investigate factors which might moderate this relationship
Next, the authors looked at other variables (domains) that might explain the relationship between practice and performance.
Theoretical moderators
◦ Games – 24% explained variance
◦ Music – 23% explained variance
◦ Sports – 20% explained variance
◦ Education – 5% explained variance
◦ Professions – 1% explained variance
Next, the authors looked at other variables (methods) that might explain the relationship between practice and performance.
Methodological moderators – Practice Assessment Methods
◦ Retrospective Interview – 20% explained variance
◦ Retrospective Questionnaire – 15% explained variance
◦ Log Method – 4% explained variance
Methodological moderators – Performance Assessment Methods
◦ Group Membership – 26% explained variance
◦ Lab Tasks – 12% explained variance
◦ Expert Ratings – 11% explained variance
◦ Standardized Objective Scoring – 10% explained variance
Results – 3 Additional Models
- Omit team sports
◦ The variance explained by deliberate practice was 12%. - Only solitary activities
◦ The variance explained by deliberate practice was 14%. - Only solitary activities AND omitted team sports.
◦ The variance explained by deliberate practice was 14%.
These results again show that deliberate practice is important to
performance, but that much of the variance is still unexplained.
This meta-analysis does not support the deliberate-practice view.
Variability in variance explained by the domain
◦ For example, it was higher in an activity which is predictable like running, but lower in a less predictable activity, such as an aviation emergency.
Ultimately, there are other variables which add to the variance in performance besides just practice.
